Having unleashed Phoenix, Phillips doesn’t seem to know how to contain or couch the performance. At some point he seems to have surrendered, and when the movie is over you realize Arthur is its only substantial character.

In Framing John DeLorean, Philadelphia-based documentarians Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce (The Art of the Steal) mix fact, drama, and speculation to draw an ambitious portrait of the fabled automaker, but within the frame, key questions remain unanswered.

A mildly charming, if singularly unoriginal, comedy.

It's intriguing enough to suck you in, but confusing, fragmentary, frustrating.

Rogue One is a minor little story with a likable cast and familiar Star Wars themes. But it tries so hard to be an epic masterpiece – with self-important speeches and an insanely outsize orchestral score – that it ends up a laughable parody of itself.

A disquieting and ultimately disappointing political thriller.

Allied comes off like a highlight reel that mimics the look and feel of a whole school of great films, from "Casablanca" to Hitchcock's "Suspicion" and "Notorious."

Like Clint Eastwood’s masterful 2006 WWII drama "Flags of Our Fathers," Lee’s film is as much about how we spin war stories as it is about war itself. Both involve a group of heroic soldiers sent home by the Pentagon to help drum up popular support. Both are made by filmmakers keenly aware that stories have the power to justify a war or turn the public against it.

Despite the competent animation, the great tunes, and funny voice work by costars Russell Brand and John Cleese, Trolls is a lackluster entry. The story is clichéd and predictable. Overall, the film has no real magic.

Storks feels way too much like a belabored and mediocre SNL sketch. Each character has some neurotic tic or crazy fixation, which they expound upon in monologues that feel like material for a stand-up act or a sitcom.

Despite a great cast and several terrific action sequences, Fuqua's film is largely forgettable.

It's nothing more than a sophisticated clone of the original, and it really overdoes the shaky-camera thing - even more than in some of the worst found-footage movies The Blair Witch Project spawned.

An uneven, perpetually redundant comedy-drama.

Just about the only cast member who doesn't go misty at one point or another is the horse that Down Under cinema charmer Bryan Brown takes for a trot late in the film.

This should have been an easy knockout. Yet the pieces just don't fit together. Hands of Stone lurches back and forth between well-crafted dramatic scenes and shabby, cliché-ridden sequences that sap the viewer's energy.

The new Ben-Hur isn't much of an improvement. Dominated by CGI effects, it's a soap opera better fit for basic cable.

The Purge: Election Year tries to show that what counts isn't firepower but compassion, not egoism but community. But frankly, it can't help but shoot itself in the foot: The violence is too tantalizing, too stylized, too fetishistic - the film features killers dressed in fanciful Halloween costumes who dance and sing as they dismember people.

The set pieces are fun, if not as spectacular as those in Jon Favreau's adaptation of Kipling's similar "The Jungle Book." And the plot moves at a nice pace.

While the plot is dumb and the script is worse, watching aliens explode in spectacular fashion isn't the worst excuse to spend to two hours in air-conditioning.

Don't get me wrong. Angry Birds doesn't depict any on-camera violence against person, bird, or pig. But there's a darkness at the heart of this movie that's hard to reconcile.

High-Rise feels like a throwback to a time when this kind of social commentary, in literature and film, seemed shocking and true. Not sure whether it's progress to say that in 2016, High-Rise doesn't shock at all.

Maybe the best reason to see Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is to catch a glimpse of the real Finca Vigia, the property, with its house and pool, gardens, and tree-lined drive, where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote - and famously drank - from 1939 until 1960. Pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls were banged out here; so, too, The Old Man and the Sea.

Keanu doesn't go far enough. Key & Peele was searing and incisive about race and American culture, and Keanu doesn't even scratch the surface.

The film is a ponderous, overwrought meditation on grief, loss, guilt, and memory that prods and probes its characters more like lab rats than living, breathing creations.

Now that Nina has finally arrived in theaters, revealing itself to be a listless, oddly constructed tale that does a poor job of capturing Simone's star quality or indomitable racial pride, it makes you wonder: Was it really worth kicking up all that controversy for a movie that's this bad?

The feeblest kind of costume drama, where the costumes have more impact than the drama and where the period details serve only as distraction, reminding audiences that things looked different back then and not much else.

Director Robert Schwentke and his writing team do their best to move things along. Actually, who knows if it's their best? Maybe they're suffering from Divergent fatigue along with the rest of us.

Tumbledown comes up light in the categories that matter most, miring a capable cast in a forced cable-knit folksiness familiar to anyone who has ever watched anything set in New England.

For every laugh that Zoolander 2 elicits, there's a pang that all this was funnier the first time around.

If you're looking for a reason to watch pretty people and cry, then, by all means, head to the theater. But it pales in comparison to other Sparks works, especially when it gets into medical-ethics territory.

The irony of Anesthesia is that, while it uses interconnectivity as a storytelling mechanism, the characters do not really connect.

For all its grand promises, Ip Man 3 teeters uneasily among B-movie clichés.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

It's refreshing to see an actor tell his own story with some real honesty. Overall, however, Tab Hunter Confidential is too much like every other Hollywood True Story out there.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

Watching people be miserable with each other for the movie's run-time does not always make for a pleasant experience.

Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

The plot itself has little momentum, and what should feel dramatic instead feels inert.

What could have been an amusing and entertaining zombie flick is, instead, a slog.

Phase II has some nice comic touches, but it's a forgettable B-movie.

A loving ode to screwball comedies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that never approaches the films it pays homage to.

Finally - and the news should really come as a relief - here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made.

It's overstating things to say the stars of Fantastic Four are Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell, because I can't remember the last time four actors appeared less invested in a movie for which they've teamed up.

There's nothing to say that crass can't be funny - and it sometimes is in Daley and Goldstein's iteration - but Vacation loses any of the ooey-gooey, family-friendly heart that made you really want Clark to get to Walley World to begin with.

The movie name-drops the cool stuff, the rebels of word and song, but the essence of the story and the cardboard characters who inhabit it are as mundane as can be.

A mid-point twist is particularly ridiculous, and in an attempt to reconcile this turning point, the final act of the movie becomes a mess.

You'd think a movie about transplanting human consciousness would be smarter than this.

If Manglehorn is to be remembered at all, it shall be for the excruciating first date that its title character goes on with a chirpy bank clerk he has long been chatting up. Her name is Dawn, and she is played by Holly Hunter.

When the films sticks with heart-tugging soldier stuff, it's not bad. When it goes beyond that premise, it becomes so entirely outlandish that it's not enjoyable anymore.

Bleak and painfully earnest.

Let sleeping bros lie.

Sadly, director Lee Toland Krieger's offering, a weak wanna-be Jean Cocteau-esque fable with magical realist pretensions, does great disservice to Lively and her remarkably accomplished costars.

Never mind the facts. True Story, slick and shaky, doesn't know where the truth lies.

A horror pic with a new gimmick that likely will spawn an entire subgenre of more substandard rubbish.

But there's not much here: The characters are paper-thin, and the action is slow, at times agonizingly so.

Not a great film. Or particularly good. In fact, it's fairly bad as B-movies go.

The germ of an interesting idea in Get Hard is completely overshadowed by the onslaught of jokes meant to be boundary-pushing and edgy.

In fact, no one in The Gunman looks happy. And what happened to chivalry? If a fierce squad of goons is coming after you and your ex, whom you still love, and there's only one Kevlar vest to throw on, don't you offer it to her? Apparently not.

A film that continues to grow more perplexing as it walks, not runs, toward an unsatisfying end.

One of the most uncinematic pieces crafted by an otherwise fine stylist, Cymbeline befuddles with its ineffective blocking and lack of art direction.

Run All Night isn't dull. The pace is breakneck, and necks get broken. But the violence is relentless, ugly, unredeemed by any real humanity.

Chappie has a nothing-to-lose Roger Cormanesque quality about it, low on budget (except for the CGI robots) and low on meaning, but full of high-velocity chases, helicopter pursuits, and weapons blasting around empty warehouses marred by graffiti and trash.

Mildly enjoyable despite its basic mediocrity.

The movie pulls off the worst kind of con: the one that disappoints.

It falls short of the mark, even as it hits every one of the genre's conventions.

In the future, in the past, at all points along the space-time continuum, the Theory of the Teenage Male Mind throws everything out of whack.

A deeply disturbing, intimate, and not unsuccessful look at 10 years in the life of a young boy, Harlon, who grows up to become a Columbine-style killer.

There's real hypocrisy here. If a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey is supposed to offer a voyeuristic experience - and not a ridiculous experience - have some integrity about your nudity. Despite what the filmmakers may want to believe, there isn't a lot else going on here. Fifty Shades of Grey Matter, not so much.

On many levels, Kingsman has the makings of a sure-fire hit. Yet, this is one spy story even the most dedicated addicts of the genre would do well to miss.

As for Kunis, she gets to wear some out-of-this-world couture, and gets to make her entrance at a marriage ceremony on a floating dais, kind of like Katy Perry at the Super Bowl.

A moody cyber-noir with not much on its mind but looking good, Blackhat is a must-see if you like your dialogue (romantic, dramatic, subtitled Cantonese) peppered with techspeak.

Directed in moody, downbeat tones by Daniel Barnz, Cake doesn't know when to stop piling on the angst.

The premise, which initially has a certain interior logic, grows implausible and then nonsensical.

If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.

As for Bale, he seems to have lost his compass. His accent strays, his famous intensity wasted on clunky dialogue.

Most of the humor in this film arises from the ludicrous squabbles among Bateman, Sudeikis, and Day, who can springboard from logic to lunacy in a single exchange.

Directed by Terrence Malick's editor and protégé, A.J. Edwards, The Better Angels abounds with Malick-ian moments: upward-pointing cameras capturing bodies wheeling through fields, plaintive voice-overs punctuated by Jew's harp and birdsong, a tendency to drift toward the sky and its moody tableau of clouds.

Firth is brilliant as a preternaturally patient man - every day he has to tell her the same exact story. But he has a creepy way about him. Is it love that drives him, or something darker?

Men, Women & Children isn't a cartoon. It wants to be real, terribly. Instead, it's just terrible.

A sweet, if predictable, kids' comedy. But you have to overlook the conveniently inconsistent behavior of all the characters - except in Garner's case. She never establishes a character.

A weak "Toy Story"-esque animated film for preschool kids made with little imagination, little art, and even less soul.

Two Night Stand, is a clever, if uneven, romcom about Generation Y's conflicted, paradoxical views of sex and love. Featuring strong dialogue and terrific performances, the film has moments of near-brilliance, but falls apart with a lame, conventional ending.

While it misses the mark most of the time, director Hilary Brougher's film has a promising story, an impressive cast, and occasional moments of grace.

Life of Crime is like an errant golf putt that appears headed for the hole, but just keeps rolling and rolling, all the way off the green. In other words, just missed . . . by a mile.

The constant flipping between stagecraft and reality creates a dissonant static that prevents any satisfying connection with the film.

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

This story truly is inspirational and a lesson about civic responsibility. However, it makes for little more than a TV movie or a straight-to-video snack.

For all its visual delights, Magic in the Moonlight, the 44th feature written and directed by the admirably industrious Woody Allen, has to be one of his bigger duds.

Like other entries of its pulpish ilk, the picture packs lots of violence, a fair bit of gore, and plenty of cheap scares.

In Don McKellar's remake of "Seducing Doctor Lewis", a 2003 French-Canadian comedy, the charm feels force-fed.

The writer-director has the talent to dig deep and lay bare the assumptions behind our idea of justice and our notions of right and wrong. In The Devil's Knot, he settles for an encyclopedic, if skin-deep, presentation.

Thank goodness for Leslie Mann. If not for the nutball charm of this tight-wound whirlwind, the dispiriting Hollywood sex comedy The Other Woman would be close to unbearable.

A tediously faithful remake of French filmmaker Luc Besson's terrific 2004 international hit "District 13," the Besson-produced Brick Mansions might have been mildly interesting had it been made a decade ago.

It's hard to know whom to blame for this futile exercise: Morris or Rumsfeld.

Although it is based on a true story, the dramatization doesn't make much sense psychologically.

This is the type of movie best enjoyed as a late-night indulgence on cable. Really late at night, when your eyes are still partially open, but your brain has called it quits.

An uneven, mildly amusing, and highly derivative flick featuring a wonderful, quirky cast as a crew of art thieves who run a complex scam on the art world, and on each other.

Non-Stop gets increasingly far-fetched as the jet makes its way across the Atlantic. Certainly, there are more red herrings on the plane than there are in the sea below. And Neeson has to stare down every last one of them.